Colleagues remember…
I met Jeffrey Fine in 1982 when I joined the Economics and Rural Development Program of IDRC’s Social Sciences Division. Jeff had been there for a couple of years before me. The program was mainly rural economics and most of the problems it looked at were local. Jeffrey believed that more attention should be paid to national and international economic problems and had just written a lengthy paper proposing a research agenda in that area. It was well accepted and soon Jeffrey was running a one-man program with projects around the world. Over time, this became the mainstream of a renamed Economic Policy Program.
A couple of reorganizations later, I was Jeff’s boss and he was again proposing something new: a large capacity-building program of economic research for Africa, to be administered by IDRC’s regional office in Nairobi. I could see that Jeff’s ambitions far exceeded what IDRC could finance, so we put together a prospectus for an African Economic Research Consortium and approached some like-minded donors. The reaction was positive; all that was needed was IDRC’s agreement and contribution. That proved more difficult than expected. The project faced opposition throughout the Centre, but Jeffrey was tenacious. After much debate, he secured approval for what became one of the Centre’s flagship projects. It succeeded not only in its own right, but also as a model for several other multidonor networks.
Jeffrey’s vision of what IDRC could do and the tenacity with which he fought for it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. I can think of few people harder to work with than Jeff. And few who accomplished as much.
David Glover
I met Jeffrey Fine in 1988, when I was a young academic at the University of Toronto invited to participate in a fledgling network called the African Economic Research Consortium. Little did I know then the remarkable scope of the endeavour or the tenacity (to use David Glover’s apt term) of its progenitor. Jeff was one of a kind at a time when IDRC had several such personalities, spawning ground-breaking efforts that endure to this day. His dedication to localization ensured that he would be the first and last non-African head of the organization, setting up the late Benno Ndulu to succeed him and go on to other important policy positions on the continent. AERC successfully navigated the trilemma of capacity building, research quality and policy impact in ways that few other such networks have. After AERC, he spent the rest of his career working on the subject he loved most: higher education processes and their connection to larger questions of development. Jeff’s and my paths crossed a number of times, and I came away inspired each time. We have lost a true pioneer of the ethos that drove and drives IDRC.
Rohinton Medhora
In 1988, Jeffrey took the IDRC conviction that research should be carried out and focused locally to get funding for economic research in Africa by Africans under the African Economic Research Consortium. In 1990 under his leadership, it introduced the extraordinarily ambitious project of a Collaborative MA Program under which university departments of economics across sub-Saharan Africa (first English-speaking schools, with the Francophones joining later) agreed to just offer the basic MA courses and to send their students to Nairobi for their specialized ones; their dissertations to be supervised by visiting academics from across the continent and overseas.
The project was introduced at a time when graduate programs were just starting up in several of the participating schools and all were underfunded. Getting multiyear funding commitments from more than five international aid agencies, on the one hand, while persuading the university departments to collaborate, was Jeffrey’s remarkable achievement in 1992.
I was Director of IDRC’s Social Sciences Division at the time and witnessed his tenacity, negotiating skill and outstanding commitment as he handed over the leadership of AERC to Benno Ndulu.
AERC has gone from strength to strength, adding a Collaborative PhD Program in 2002, an MA in Agriculture and Applied Economics in 2005, and a Central Bank Governors Forum in 2014.
Caroline Pestieau
The African Economic Research Consortium’s remembrance of Jeff as its first Executive Director is found here.
Bulletin 76
April 2025